De repente fica tudo preto de gente

Marcelo Evelin is a choreographer and performer who, after spending twenty years in Europe, returned to live and work in his home town of Teresina on the fringes of Brazil. His demanding Matadouro at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2012 was shockingly thought-provoking and his new show confirms just how wonderfully unique he is. De repente fica tudo preto de gente (“Suddenly everywhere is black with people”) gathers performers and audience together in a disturbingly crowded situation. At the origin of the project is the essay Crowds and Power (1960) in which Elias Canetti explores the enigmatic and threatening phenomenon of the crowd: “Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body... It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all: they have a goal… the blackest spot.” Delving into the darkness of a primal subject and looking us straight in the face, in this moving show Marcelo Evelin gives body to and challenges the relationship between the I and the We, identity and otherness, belonging and exclusion.

A gang, a tribe, a mass of people. Revolt and uprising, war dance, guerrilla troops, celebration rituals, hunting packs. Animals transformed into humans through the long and tattered fabric of time. They may be landless, Jews seeking the Promised Land or being taken to the gas chambers, henchmen from Canudos or backcountry bandits. They could be Aborigines, Eskimos, nomads in a vast desert, Tuaregs among scalding dunes, sailors rocked by the crashing sea. They might be the remaining 50 men, 50 women and 70 children from the Guarani-Kaiowá tribe, who have come to be perversely threatened by a government imposing its power play on the innocent. Better the Guarani-Kaiowás then, since there is nothing left for them and any attempt to speak of gathering - as corpulent race, culture and territoriality - conflicts with this subjectively announced slaughter, in the powerful application of what in biopolitics can be called "the naked life".

The knot, the confusion. Ancient Babel, the corridors in the US towers harbouring blazing aeroplanes, the turmoil, dead-end alley, hell's sitting room. High-density fear, malevolent mechanisms that debilitate contemporary humankind, precisely where there seems to be progress and technological expansion, with apparatuses of power aligned and paralleled, accessible to all on a global scale. Fear leads me to the other, as in a movement towards myself. Become the other, enter the other, merge with the other to escape your own fear and the incommensurable sense of your own existence that overflows with fear.

The aeroplane computer screen shows the flight path travelled and to be travelled, with a little picture of the plane leaving Africa and entering the sea for the dizzying crossing to Rio de Janeiro. I think of the crowd dragged from one side to the other, they wobble, stumble, on a wing and a prayer, shaking yet holding on in vain, the crowd in exodus, migration, diaspora, exile, in the constant spatial and political reorganisation of this flowing, branching geography.

The downfall is to simultaneously yield and resist, surrender and hold firm, dig in their heels and give up. The body which adheres to a molecular animality from the beginnings of life, when we were water and atoms, stubborn in our insistent evolution. The vertical line, the spinal column constructed straight to enter the centre of the skull, vertebra on vertebra in pillar logic: the arrogant biped is born, declares victory over gravity and achieves intelligence and reason. With these, the infamous subterfuges of power, logic, morality, institutions, control, discipline and common sense.

Karada. "Body" in Japanese. The dialectical notion of "body" in Japanese contains the void within itself, stripping away the flesh so that being a body necessitates being empty. Karada is the big emptiness, the resonance of nothing existing, of comprising nothing, that is, the constitution of nothing as not being anything. The first moment of bodies separating punctuates the fatality of existence itself, that which we refuse to confront, to face squarely, for we would collapse under the monstrous weight of the truth. The empty body is the body that dances, regenerating itself cell by cell in a transcendental, cosmic movement. The empty body is the dead body, not the dying body nor that confined to the signs of death, the body that goes beyond the condition of life expectancy and is consumed in gentle, fateful death, certain death fully given over. The empty body lets the ego drain out of itself as a hollow, a corpulent hole, where air penetrates and drool dribbles out, this viscous liquid which may be the essence of non-codified language, not transformed into word or sign, not perturbed by rhetoric or linguistics.

The empty body folded between muscles, bones and tendons. Folds and not cracks, folds that mark the precise place on the blank paper, mark what is already no longer. The fold makes the crease with whatever it can in the body, everything and anything, the body a bundle of force, a vector of infinite possibilities. The empty body which still has a racing pulse, a gesture of salute, almost like a farewell unfolding from it. The hand that points, that beckons, that sustains the ideology which is lost, outdated, consumed by the belief against external power. The fist that tightly grips internalised power, the enemy transferred into the body, housed in the entrails, in the folds of organs and the body's remaining intestines.

Panic is at the same time anticipated discharge and dispersion. The clash of a crowd igniting. The crowd in pursuit reduces the universe to one individual, the guilty one, Christ, the sacrificed one, he who is thrown to the lions.

Marcelo Evelin is a choreographer, performer and researcher. He lived mainly in Europe from 1986, working in the field of dance and physical theatre and collaborating with professionals who have a variety of languages, nationalities and experiences, as well as in projects involving music, video, installation and the occupation of specific spaces. He is in residence at Hetveem Theater in Amsterdam with his company Demolition Inc., and teaches improvisation and composition at the Mime School in Amsterdam which also creates projects and guides students in creative processes. He runs workshops and collaborative projects around Europe, America, Africa and South America, as well as in Brazil where he returned in 2006. He has also been working as a manager and curator, coordinating a platform of independent artists, the Núcleo do Dirceu in Teresina, Piauí, which also undertakes research and development in contemporary performing arts. Núcleo has twice been recognised by the São Paulo Association of Arts Critics (APCA): in 2008 for the “Best Public Policy for Dance”, and in 2011 for “Production, Formation, Creation and Diffusion in Dance”. Marcelo’s more recent pieces, Bull Dancing (2006) and MONO (2008), have been performed in Brazil and abroad. With Núcleo do Dirceu, he premiered MATADOURO in November 2010 at the Panorama de Dança Festival in Rio de Janeiro before performances at the Galpão do Dirceu in Piauí and the SESC Arts Exhibition in São Paulo. This work concludes the trilogy based on Euclides da Cunha: the land in Sertão, the man in Bull Dancing, and the fight in Matadouro (Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2012).